Battlecruiser Alamo: Tip of the Spear

by Richard Tongue

  TIP OF THE SPEAR

  Battlecruiser Alamo: Book 4

  Richard Tongue

  Battlecruiser Alamo #4: Tip of the Spear

  Copyright © 2013 by Richard Tongue, All Rights Reserved

  First Kindle Edition: November 2013

  Cover By Keith Draws

  Editorial Assistance from Peter Long

  With Thanks To: Mark Berryman and Jon Clivaz

  All characters and events portrayed within this ebook are fictitious; any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Join the Battlecruiser Alamo Mailing List: http://eepurl.com/A9MdX

  The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you'll find him;

  His father's sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him;

  "Land of Song!" said the warrior bard,

  "Though all the world betrays thee,

  One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

  One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

  The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's chain

  Could not bring his proud soul under;

  The harp he loved ne'er spoke again,

  For he tore its chords asunder;

  And said "No chains shall sully thee,

  Thou soul of love and bravery!

  Thy songs were made for the pure and free

  They shall never sound in slavery!"

  The Minstrel Boy, Thomas Moore

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sub-Lieutenant Margaret Orlova clung to the rail in the overcrowded shuttle, wondering whether to be happy or not that her rank had given her the opportunity to claim a window seat for the hair-raising flight over the jungle of Jefferson. Naturally, she'd feel a lot happier if she could be flying the shuttle herself; the pilot, Midshipman Steele, only recently out of the hospital, was following a river towards the capital of the planet, Yreka. The city was currently in the throes of a revolution, with the rebels on the verge of defeat against the entrenched forces of the Legion. Hopefully, in a few hours' time, that would all be changed.

  She looked around the cramped cabin at the squad of espatiers she was to command for the drop. All of them arrayed in battle armor, plasma rifles strapped tightly to their legs, the unaccustomed parachute backpacks secured to their shoulders. Shaking her head, she wished that she hadn't introduced the sport of parachuting to the troops; ever since she'd executed an emergency escape back on Ragnarok – which seemed like years ago, even though it was only a matter of months – all of them had been anxious to try it. Certainly they'd been quick enough to suggest it during the tactical briefings when Captain Marshall had called for a rapid strike on the city.

  Her communicator buzzed, and she reached up to her helmet microphone to clear the channel. The voice of Ensign Gabrielle Esposito – her current boss as head of Alamo's overworked Espatier contingent – rang into her eyes, loud and clear.

  "Tabby says that we'll be over the city in one minute. Everyone ready for the jump?"

  Orlova glanced at the faces of her squad, "About as ready as they'll ever be. Sergeant Kozu's force?"

  "All set to go. I'm just worried that the troops are looking forward to this a bit too much."

  "They'll change their minds after they've actually tried this. See you on the ground."

  "Roger, Esposito out."

  Shaking her head, Orlova smashed her hand twice on the hull, the loud metallic ring stopping the murmured discussions of her squad. Corporal Clarke, the grizzled senior NCO, clapped a couple of the younger privates on the back when they continued to talk; within a few seconds everyone was giving her their full attention.

  "We'll be dropping into Yreka's main street in about thirty seconds. Remember that your chutes will open immediately, and that you will be vulnerable to ground fire until you hit the ground."

  "Hell, we've been shot at before, Sub!" the boisterous Private Flanagan – who had a brand new scar decorating most of her left cheek, replied.

  "Not like this. It's open season on anyone wearing a Legion uniform, but try not to burn the city down. We're going to need it." She smiled, "But we're going to need you more, so don't take any risks." The troops laughed, clapping each other on the shoulder, before she stopped them by raising her hand. "One last thing. It's happy hour in my dad's bar when this is over...so if anyone torches it, they're walking back to Alamo!"

  The lighting dimmed in the shuttle as it banked to gain altitude. Strapping herself to the ceiling rail, she braced herself for the jump. The doors slowly slid open, wind gusting into the cabin, buffeting them about. Yreka opened out beneath her, and without a second thought – because she was afraid what that thought might be – she took a step out into space, launching herself out of the safety of the shuttle cabin into the air. With a loud rip, the cord tugged her parachute open, and she raised her hands to the strap, getting herself in the correct orientation.

  When she'd done this trick on Ragnarok, she was using an emergency escape chute. The designers hadn't particularly cared where the users would come down, simply that they made it down to the surface in as near as possible to one piece. This time, she had the benefit of a day's work by Alamo's engineering team, and as usual, Lieutenant Quinn had managed to pull off a miracle. The canopy was being gently adjusted back and forth to compensate for wind, guiding her gently down to the pre-arranged rendezvous point. She rocked forward as the chute spilled some air, taking it down to the target area.

  Tipping her head forward, she dropped the image intensifier from her helmet, picking out targets on the ground. Evidently they'd managed to arrive in the nick of time; a group of men wielding old rifles were crouched behind an improvised barrier taking pot-shots at legionnaires that were getting awfully close, and she could see more of them heading around through side alleys. Columns of smoke from other parts of the city showed battles in progress elsewhere, but if the situation had devolved down to isolated street fights, then the rebels were on the brink of defeat. One of them looked up at her, waving his rifle; she grinned back at him.

  A pair of bullets cracked past her, tearing holes in the canopy that the self-sealing fabric quickly dealt with – another one of Quinn's touches. Her feet planted on the ground, and she ducked and rolled as her canopy detached, billowing across the street; she beat the rest of the squad to the deck by only a couple of seconds. She used them to scramble into cover, leaping behind the barrier to join the surprised rebels. Her plasma rifle in her arms, she fired a couple of shots at the ground to kick up smoke and dust, buying a little time for the rest of her squad to deploy.

  "Sub-Lieutenant Orlova, Battlecruiser Alamo," she said, glancing around at the bedraggled rebels.

  One of them, an old man with faded red hair part-way down his back and a mean grimace on his face, replied, "Captain Montgomery. You our reinforcements?"

  "Damn right. Two other squads are deploying right now. My orders are to take the fight to the enemy and get Jefferson's flag over the capital!" She'd rehearsed that several times; Captain Marshall had impressed upon her that this was not a battle to win Jefferson for the Triplanetary Confederation; they were liberators, not conquerors. Given that her father was one of the ones they were liberating, she was forced to agree – and so did the rebels, who cheered loudly. Even Montgomery cracked what was obviously a rare smile.

  "Let's go get them, then," he replied.

  Orlova peered through the smoke, seeing a pair of flashes of green fire lighting up the street, and smelling wood smoke; evidently her squad had already found it essential to disregard her orders about torching the city. She lined up a shot at a pair of legionnaires still slowly advancing, a
nd squeezed the trigger. One second they were there, the next, all that remained was a cloud of dust and ash. Almost too easy.

  "Corporal, I want the first fire team advancing up this street towards the capital building. Rebels will follow up in support," she glanced over at Montgomery, who nodded, "and two pairs running parallel up the side street. I don't know who started shooting at buildings, but they'd better have good targets."

  "Roger, Sub-Lieutenant, we're on it."

  Hefting her gun in her hands, noting the admiring stares of the rebels, who started to look down with disdain at their primitive rifles, Orlova started to make her way down the street, letting the fire team take point. The gunfire was beginning to ebb, and she was getting the impression that the legionnaires were falling back, giving the ground they had so recently won. The rebels, following, were looking around nervously, almost as if they were finding it hard to believe they were actually winning.

  She looked around at the buildings as she made her way forward, the crackle of fire and the smell of smoke on the air. There was plenty of damage, but she'd seen worse before; most of the buildings could probably be repaired, especially with help from Alamo's converters – assuming that they were not tied up repairing the damage the ship had sustained taking this planet. As the unit began to turn down a street, she felt rough hands on her back, pushing her to the ground, as a bullet cracked into the road by her head.

  "Sniper, Sub!", Corporal Clarke said. Following the grizzled veteran's hand, she looked over at one of the few remaining undamaged buildings, shaking her head. Balconies all across the front of the building, lots of places to hide. It looked as if the bullet had come from the top floor, and she glanced over at the corporal and nodded; he slid a long tube out of his backpack and settled down to firing position.

  "We can storm it, Sub-Lieutenant," Montgomery said, crawling across the ground.

  Shaking her head, she replied, "They've got the advantage of position. You could lose all your men and still not get close." She tapped the Corporal on the shoulder. "Take your shot."

  With a look of horror on his face, Montgomery watched a blue bolt arcing towards the building, slamming into the wall and neatly demolishing the top floor, a column of smoke punching its way through the clouds. That stopped the shooting dead for a second, as everyone in the battle turned to look.

  "What the hell are you doing? You're causing more damage than the Legion!" Montgomery yelled, clutching at her shoulder.

  "Listen, Captain," she stressed the rank with mild contempt, "I want to win this fight without losing any more men than we have to. Buildings can be rebuilt, soldiers can't." She gestured up the side street, at the Governor's Mansion ahead, "Come on, we take that and this battle's won."

  Her communicator chirped, "Esposito here. That was a hell of a bang."

  "I think it had the desired effect. We're about at the Mansion, you guys all set?"

  "Got them from three angles."

  Another voice burst in, "Kozu here. The enemy units that can't make the mansion are streaming into the jungle. Should I engage?"

  Somehow, Orlova could tell that Esposito was shrugging, "They're a problem we can worry about tomorrow. Let them go; Captain wants that mansion taken. And no heavy fire, stress that! We need that building intact if we're going to get any intel from this."

  "See you at the top."

  "Now you care about public property?" Montgomery said, shaking his head in disgust."

  "Use your head, Captain. That's got all the command and communications you are going to need to establish control, and we both badly need the records they'll have stored inside."

  Turning her back on the rebel, she followed her fire teams down the side of the street, cautiously moving from shadow to shadow as the fire began to resume, the occasional crack of a bullet. No machine guns, she noted with relief. She paused in the entrance of a barbershop, staring in for a second at a couple of terrified civilians hiding under a counter, flashing them what she hoped was a reassuring smile, then turning back to the building.

  When they'd built the mansion, they'd certainly opted for the 'impressive terror' look. Ten feet walls surrounding a tall tower, balconies protected with plenty of cover, nozzles of machine guns bristling out from all sides. There was another tower at the rear; the orbital recon had found a small airstrip inside the compound, just big enough for their primitive planes to take off. For any attack the rebels could have mounted, this would have been an extremely difficult nut to crack. With the plasma guns the espatiers were carrying, it was just a matter of picking the key targets without doing too much collateral damage. And the men inside would know that.

  She glanced down at her watch, counting down the seconds before her attack, then heard a low rumbling sound coming from behind the building; it took her a second to recognize the noise, a biplane struggling for altitude. Someone was obviously making a run for it; a few green balls shot into the sky, none of them making contact with the target – obviously a good pilot. Pity he was wearing the wrong uniform.

  "Right, open fire!" she shouted, and with her order a cluster of plasma bolts burst from half a dozen guns, explosions erupting on all sides of the compound, opening large gaps in the wall and ripping holes where fortifications once were. She slowly began to inch forward, waiting to face a final, desperate charge, when she was thrown to the ground by a terrific explosion, chunks of concrete thrown through the air, a deafening roar sending her hands slapping to her ears a second too late, her rifle dropping to the ground as she rolled on the street. Lying on her back, she saw a low mushroom cloud start to rise, and there was a brief flash of panic before she realized that her dosimeter wasn't reading a thing. A conventional explosion, the largest she had ever seen, and the cloud kept on getting bigger and bigger.

  The air was full of dust, and she could only tell where her troops were by the choking and expletive-laden spluttering. Looking up at the ever-growing cloud, her communicator chirped twice – a call from Alamo. Turning the volume up as far as it could go, she slid the earpiece home.

  "Orlova here," she yelled.

  "Sub-Lieutenant? What the hell was that, we tracked it from orbit!"

  Looking up at the cloud again, she said, "Regret to inform the Captain that our primary objective has failed. We've got Yreka secured, but we're not going to get anything out of the Governor's Mansion other than a reconstruction contract."

  "Damn." There was a brief pause. "Start cleaning up the mess, Sub-Lieutenant. Alamo out."

  She looked around at the wreckage, shaking her head. That was going to be a difficult order to fulfill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Marshall shook his head as he finished Esposito's after action report on the Battle of Yreka, slamming it to the desk as he read the last line with such force he briefly worried he'd broken the datapad. They'd needed the intelligence in that building, needed it badly. He didn't consider the enemy forces remaining on the planet to be a significant threat, but what lay beyond it certainly was. There was an enemy out there, one with advanced space-based weaponry – but one which was arming its planetary forces with equipment that was centuries out of date. Something was missing from the equation, and he badly need to know what.

  Not that he could follow up on a lead if he had one. He glanced outside his window at the rocky walls of the spaceport, then up at the clock; in nine hours, most of the personnel were going to be leaving while Lieutenant Quinn tore the guts of his ship apart. The ride through the atmosphere had been quite an experience, but it had wrecked Alamo's superstructure. Not that his engineer seemed to mind. Every time he spoke to him he was grinning with glee at the prospect of all those interesting repairs. Sighing, he rose to his feet; time for his staff meeting.

  He walked through the bridge, returning the salute of the bored-looking Sub-Lieutenant Franklin, sitting in the command chair. Aside from the flight engineer, no-one else was on the bridge; they weren't needed at the moment, so most of the bridge shifts were over on the spacedoc
k helping to make it ready for occupation. And playing zero-gravity tag down in the lower levels, most likely. He wasn't particularly looking forward to the ship's spin being taken off.

  The elevator doors slid shut, and he sighed once again. As a junior officer he had detested meetings like this, and being promoted to the point where he was running – and calling – such meetings had not made him enjoy them any more than he had back when he wasn't wearing any braid on his shoulder. Everything was a lot simpler when he had been sitting in the cockpit of a fighter, his responsibilities limited to his own survival, and that of his wingmate.

  He arrived at the briefing room, once again wondering why the Callistan engineers who had converted the ship back during the war had elected to place it so far from any of the useful areas of the ship, and almost tripped over the green-haired figure of Spaceman Harper, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pair of terminals at her feet, connected to a series of systems with a tangle of cables.

  "What the hell are you doing, Spaceman?" he said, looking down.

  "Huh?" She looked up, "Sorry, boss. Didn't know anyone was coming down this corridor."

  "You are supposed to check the scheduling before starting maint...what are you doing, anyway?"

  "Just some tests on the security sub-systems."

  Shuddering inside as he remembered the consequences of some of the young hacker's previous 'tests', he asked, "Anything I need to be worried about?"

  "Just about finished." She patted the wall. "Finally beginning to get this beast up to some sort of spec."

  Smiling, he replied. "Good. Tidy up and get into the briefing room."

  "What?"

  "Make it quick. Meeting starts in two minutes."

  "What do you want me for?"

  "Only one way to find out, Spaceman." Carefully stepping over the tangle, he walked into the briefing room and took his seat at the head of the table. His Executive Officer, Senior Lieutenant Dietz, was already there, waiting; he gave his commander a curt nod before returning to the datapad he was scrutinizing. Through the door, he heard a curse, and turned to look. Sub-Lieutenant Matsumoto, his diminutive Administration Officer, was sprawled on the deck, swearing at the spaceman in vicious-sounding Japanese. Glancing up at Marshall, she saluted and hastily rose to her feet, walking quickly into the room.